Eliminate high school honors classes to increase diversity?

you must be using your own personal definitions of words then....kindly revert to the common definitions.

Post: # 4,424,527 •

You must be using your personal definitions. Saying that someone defends bastions of white, Protestant ascendancy doesn't mean i'm referring to honors courses, unless i say that specifically, which i did not.

If you were not referring the the thread topic then you had the responsibility to say so, when you don't the assumption stands that you are on topic. We assume that you are being forthright and not resorting to rhetorical trickery, this is part of civilized discourse.

But if you want us to presume the worst I guess we could do that..

Some of the best years of my life were in Evanston, back when I was in grammar school, and we moved right after that. Probably many in my class went to ETHS (evanston township high school) but only one 'best' friend did, and I lost track of her when we were both around seventeen, when she married. I disapproved, what a fuckwit I was, about that. But.. in my memory, she got great schooling in art. I don't know if ETHS had honors classes back then, graduating class of '59. My own small school in another state had placements at a local college, me one of two, er, selected. Not the same as present ap classes. Yeah, I'm white. Arguably dumb, but never mind.

Well this whole thing on race and brains drives me nuts, just from my own observance.


On your thread connection - after your More link, which I haven't read yet, back later.

Adds/edits, at first look, I can get behind eliminating honors classes. Then I see the problems re stultifying some and totally stopping others.

this whole business about how some racial pressure groups are claiming that be a member of a certain race is a handicap in academic attainment drives me nuts. Sure, some races have more of the lower classes, or more people who dont speak english as their first language, so for instance they are not going to pick up the vocabulary at home that some other kids will, but the problem is not race, it is class and it is due to language choices. If people know that they ave these handicaps then they know that they need to work harder than everybody else if they want to be successful. Hard work is not abuse, it might be unfair but life is not fair so whaa-whaa. If the result is honors classes not having the same racial mix as the general population then it does, but that is not a problem.

very odd to find myself so much in agreement with hawkeye here

but yeah

and those dropout billionaires boomer referenced - they worked hard - maybe not in a classroom setting, but they worked hard

You consistently presume the absurd. The thread title is a question, not a statement. At no time have i stated that i think that honors courses should be eliminated. I am not responsible if you are too lazy or too stupid to follow the argument i made at the beginning of the thread.

It's hilarious to see you attempt to lecture anyone on civilized discourse, or to complain about rhetorical trickery. I made plain my position in my very first post. Too bad, so sad if you were to dense to understand it.

In the latter part of the 19th century, and particularly after the war with Prussia, educators in France became militant advocates of universal education, which eventually resulted in laws requiring school attendance by all students. As well, the French state was motivated by their colonial empire in the West Indies, Africa and Asia, to perform a mission civiliatrice--a civilizing mission. For educators in France, that meant that little brown babies, and black babies and yellow babies should receive the same education as little white babies in France. The entire issue of educational standards became important to French educators and the government.

Now Alfred Binet (né Alfredo Binetti--he was from Nice, which belonged to the Italian Kingdom of Sardinia at the time of his birth) came on the scene. He was a strange duck, and was largely self-ecucated, but whithin the context of the university education he received at the Sorbonne. Binet became a psychologist, and although he did not participate in professional societies and was professionally a loner, he became interested in the education of children because of his interest in how his own children learned. He did become a member of La Société Libre pour l'Etude Psychologique de l'Enfant (the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child), and was, therefore, one of the members who responded to a request by the French government for the Society to form a commission on the education of retarded children.

Binet and a colleague named Simon came up with a test which became known as the Binet-Simon test. This test was also adapted by the French government for use in comparing the education performance of children in the African and Asian colonies to that of children in France. Binet had no illusions about the value of the test. He lamented the fact that, as used, it measured quantitative educational attainment rather than qualitative, and pointed out the intelligence develops at different rates in individuals, and can be affected by environment. He came to the conclusion that intelligence is not a product of genetics, that it is variable and not fixed, and that useful testing could only disntinguish between the performance of individuals from the same background. In essence, he felt that the test which he and Théodore Simon had devised did not in fact measure intelligence, but only enculturation within the context of the dominant cultural group. That was OK with the French governmet, though, because they wanted those little brown and black babies to turn out just like the little white babies in France. They were delighted to think that they could accurately measure enculturation.

But then the Americans got their hands on the test, and extrapolated it not only beyond what Binet considered the limitations of the test, but out of all recognition from Binet's and Simon's intention. They (Binet and Simon) had intended to test learning ability, and not intelligence, and Binet held that the test could not test intelligence. But the Americans wanted to use it to test intelligence, so they discounted or ignored the criticisms Binet and Simon had made of their own test even before it began to be studied in the United States. A professor at Stanford University (don't recall his name, if i actually ever knew it) took the test and created what he called an intelligence test, and the Stanford-Binet Scale for Measuring Intelligence has been in use for a century now--the "IQ" tests which were being used in high schools as late as the 1960s were Stanford-Binet tests. The commercial, governmental and military sector of the white, Protestant ascendancy were all over it, and as early as the first world war, it was being used to tell them just what they wanted to hear--that white boys were good to go as aviators, artillerymen and particularly officers, but the black boys were only good as stevedores and laborers in construction battalions.

Standardized testing in the United States is the legacy of the Stanford-Binet scale. It is used not solely in schools, but it is used to determine military occupational specialities for new recruits in the armed forces, and to place civil service applicants. This is the bastion of the white, Protestant ascendancy to which i referred earlier--standardized testing. And this is what i have been talking about since the thread began.

I've posted this elsewhere but it seems appropriate here as well...

Great video, Boom . . . i enjoyed watching it again. And, i think, it makes my point, at least tangentially.

This reminds me of one of the most excruciating experiences of my life -- our class being made to read Romeo and Juliet, aloud, in the 7th grade.

My father was a great reciter of poets and authors and playwrites, including Shakespeare, so I had grown up hearing it as it was meant to be heard. Perhaps it was having that comparison that made the class work so unbearable.

Someone had decided this would be good for us though. It made us all hate Shakespeare so I think the assignment backfired.

Admittance of students strictly by diveristy and sports ability and not by merit may play a role in the academic problems now apparent at the US Naval Academy.

I graduated from a small high school on Chicago's SouthSide. We didn't have a gym, nor did we have honors classes. I know I took English, but I don't remember a thing about the courses.

Didn't affect me and it didn't affect my classmates, who went on to several excellent Universities in the Chicago area.

As I recall, Langston Hughes didn't take a single English honors course and yet is a great 20th century black poet.

I think that simply refers to the fact that talented people who are also fortunate enough to have goals and the self control needed to achieve them can do well in almost any environment.

However I believe that the prevailing view, that statistical imbalances in any group sorted on the basis of performance necessarily constitute "proof" that some form of covert racism is involved, is positively harmful to those who are the presumed victims of this racism. Life involves many competitive processes and a necessary part of education is to prepare students for them. It is precisely these kinds of political judgements being inserted to the educational process that is destroying the confidence of a growing segment of the population in our public schools.

There is no reason that the whites
shoud sacrifice their own well-being because of "diversity".
If good programs become unavailable in that school,
then thay shoud go elsewhere for their educational needs.





David

What political judgment is being "inserted to" the educational process, O'George? Could you please refer to Joe's article in the original post so that we can see exactly what you mean?

Which is what has happened and will continue to happen. Driving one segment of a group away is clearly not consistent with a regard for "diversity."

It also doesn't do much good for the group that remains if the intent was to benefit that group by interaction with the one driven away.

And driving the successful white families out of the public education system is one sure way to further weaken support for public education systems. We are near the breaking point on public education, the point where the Americans who care most about making sure their kids are well educated give up on public education, at the point we will have vouchers and we will see schools become much more stratified by class and culture (to include race) than they are today.

Those like me who believe not only in public education but also believe that successful public education is critical to maintaining American democracy can not help to be be horrified by the current situation, as well as the dim prospects for the future of public education. The idiots currently running this system, and particularly the damage they they are doing to education by allowing all kinds of non educational agenda's to divert them away from the pursuing of quality education for our kids, makes it almost impossible for education to be successfully reformed.

We have now waited several decades for the fix of public education. At some point, no matter how much we beleive in it in theory, we are going to give up on public education if we cant make it work.

The "celebration of diversity" , which all too often is a code phrase for forcing statistical parity in the face of real differences. This does harm to both groups by deemphasizing individual achievement and depriving developing children on real feedback relative to their learning..

huh

I thought that was just common sense.